Hello. I'm working for a government office, and we have a really old alphaserver. This alphaserver used to be used for financial stuff, but has just been sitting around for years. One of the schools in town wants it, to let the IT students play with. Before we can give it to them, we need to format the drives, so as to not pass on sensitive information.

The problem is, the only member of the current staff to ever use it doesn't remember how, and threw out the books years ago. I've spent some time fiddling with it, but haven't really gotten anywhere.

Could somebody please give me a hand?

Thank you in advance,
- Jeff

In VMS, there is the command
$ ANALYZE/MEDIA/EXERCISE=(FULL,KEEP) device:

But of course this can't be done on the system disk. To erase the system-disk, boot from the VMS installation CD, then do the above command.

Before erasing the system disk, save the VMS base license for the school: file sys$system:lmf$license.ldb .